Health Exchanges just a Step in Government Take-Over of Health

The September 4, 2013, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine includes an article by liberal Brookings Institution economist Henry Aaron and DC Health Benefit Exchange Authority Board Member Kevin Lucia, appropriately entitled “Only the Beginning – What’s Next at the Health Insurance Exchanges?”

“Mundane administrative tasks will occupy the exchanges for the first year or two. But the exchanges are an instrument of enormous potential power,” the authors say.

They outline “the future” with this expanded power, for example:

1) States may bar the sale of insurance to individuals and small businesses outside the exchanges, as Vermont and Washington, D.C. already have done, or require that the same plans be sold inside and outside the exchanges

2) Exchanges could advertise information on the quantity, quality, and pricescharged by hospitals, doctors, and other providers and bar plans that do not meet their standards.

3) States can require plans to offer incentives for people to use high-quality, low-cost health care services and providers. They also could require providers to apply research findings from analyses of “comparative effectiveness.”

Anyone who says ObamaCare isn’t a government take-over of health care needs to pay better attention. We should all be very, very concerned.